Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Rules
Having started with free will, next let's look at rules,
positioning rules as the opposite of free will, as if to say, if there
are rules and I can't do anything I want to do, that means somebody is
trying to intrude on my free will.

I'm going to spend
considerable time on rules, given their importance in everyday life, in
religion--in fact, you could say, in the whole scheme of things--as well
as to the thesis I'm developing.

In America, rules
don't come to mind initially as
something we praise. We see rules as confining, as an impediment to
freedom, as something to be overcome. Can that view of rules be
unrelated to the prototypical American ethos--individualistic,
independent,
anti-authoritarian?

Anti-authoritarianism is as
American as apple pie. Yet there is also a familiar Christian subtext
to the objection to rules. It is not for nothing that there is
"protest" in "Protestant."

Let's look at that etymology a little further. It's worth noting that protest comes to us through Middle English and Old French from the Latin pro-testari,
to testify before or publicly testify--to declare--retained in
statements such as "He protested his innocence," or "He protested his
love for her." In Shakespeare's day, to protest in the sense of to proclaim
wasn't limited to abstractions such as protesting one's sentiments;
Shakespeare could speak of "Unrough youths who even now/Protest their
first manhood" (dictionary example).

So it may be that imagining the verb protest
to have meant, for Martin Luther, "to strongly object," is to read back
into the past what it has come to mean today. Scholar John Madden, in a
lecture on the Reformation (Odyssey of the West IV--Toward Enlightenment, Modern Scholar), says Luther did not
defiantly hammer his 95 theses to the church door as we visualize the
scene now; he merely tacked up the subject of his forthcoming lecture.
In other words, the way he got angry was the way university professors
still get angry: they put it into a lecture.

It's also
noteworthy that, according to Wictionary, the transitive usage by which
we say, "I protest the results of the election," or, "I protest the
building of a shopping center in this residential neighborhood," is
chiefly North American.

Nevertheless, whatever the
spirit in which Luther posted his theses in 1517, Protestants today
usually picture themselves as having stood up to unjust authority,
including declaring their freedom from Catholic "dogma" (rules).

From
my vantage point as a Jew, I have often thought I could pick out a
central tension within Christianity. Jesus vs. Church, rebellion vs.
authority. As soon as anything gets established, there are rules;
those who disagree with the rules (and there are always some who
disagree) condemn the rules in the name of following Jesus, tarring the
objectionable religious establishment as rule-bound and authoritarian.

A. N. Wilson, writing in Paul: The Mind of the Apostle, parses that tension in terms of Paul and Jesus, with, in his rendition, Paul representing established political authority--the conservative end of the spectrum--and Jesus representing liberalism, or sometimes even theocracy-based anarchism and revolution:

...The
Paul/Jesus dichotomy is never more sharply shown than in its political
implications; nor is it a Catholic/Protestant divide. On the whole, the
more Paulist the Christian, the more likely to support the political status quo: Luther shored up the German princes and Cranmer baptised not merely the Tudor realpolitik
but the English idea of themselves as an independent entity at the
birth of the nation state in Europe. Ignatius, by contrast, served a
theocracy of which he believed Jesus to be king, and saw nothing wrong
with undermining and spying against sovereign states. Paul would have
been amazed by the idea of Jesuits; Simon the Zealot would have
understood them. The United States was founded by Protestant
Jesus-worshippers....

Back in 1950s and
'60s America, and still sometimes detectable, there was a notion that
Protestantism vs. Catholicism was the crucial issue; as we just saw, A.
N. Wilson says not.

In a Christian context these days, I more often hear of "rules" in terms of Judaism and what "the Jewish leaders" did.

In
that Christianity vs. Judaism narrative, rules can function as the
opposite of Christianity--rules, accordingly, becoming something "the
Jews" followed but Jesus didn't, something the
"Jewish leaders" imposed but that he overthrew, rules being what Paul
even calls (according to some traditional readings) the veritable cause
of sin. As a result of the language of the Gospels and the Epistles
and of later theology, there is a wealth of Christian suspicion of rules
and "law." That is a notion that frequently surfaces.

Please
note that the Christian habit of seeing "rules" as "Jewish" in a
pejorative sense says more about Christianity than it does about
Judaism.

In other words, it's part of Christianity's picture
of Judaism and the general usage of Judaism as a foil for Christianity,
for the purpose of saying this ("we"--that is, Christianity) is good,
while that ("they"--Judaism), is bad, so join up with us and repudiate
them.

By extension, since "we" (here, Christians) have
now declared "them" (Jews) bad, their rules, by definition, are bad,
too--meaningless regulations for the purpose of "holding people down,"
or whatever "we" (Christians) perceive as the opposite of what "we" are
about.

What I have just described is a polemic: a
common type of argument that, unlike debate, aims to establish the
truth of one position and the falsity of the opposing position, between
which there is no middle ground. In a polemic, the opposing position is
caricatured for ease of demolishing it.

Those accused
of holding the opposing position then are conveniently available for use
as a "common enemy," which works like this: A common enemy
functions to paper over all troubling internal disagreement. By means
of the common enemy a group outsources all disruptive conflict. The
group makes some person or segment the scapegoat and pins everything on
them. By that sleight of hand, those "others" are now the outsiders,
the troublemakers, the divisive ones, the cause of all difficulties, and
the deserving focus of ire by an ingroup now purified and united
against--the common enemy.

Here I'm claiming that,
just as the issue of rules is not an issue of Protestantism vs.
Catholicism, neither, in fact, is it one of Christianity vs. Judaism,
certain familiar habits of thinking notwithstanding.

Theologically
speaking, Judaism cannot be reduced to rules, regulations, and the
established order. To take one example: While on one hand, the creation
story may capture the pole of bringing order out of chaos, on the other
hand, the calling down of messy plagues on Pharaoh reflects the
opposite.

Nor is lawlessness an accurate portrayal of Christianity.

Last
summer (2012) I was a guest at a Sunday School
class during which someone brought up rules in the familiar light--as
though they were something Jewish that Jesus was against--but the Sunday
school
teacher, who happened to be a seminary faculty member, said, no, that
was incorrect. The tension over rules--what, how much, and how
many--was a tension within Christianity, not between Christianity and Judaism, she said.

Be
that as it may, the Christian habit of thinking about rules as meaning
Judaism is so common and deeply entrenched that "rules," if one is a
Christian, is something of a codeword. Just
say "rules" in a certain tone, and everybody knows what's meant. It's
like the old saw about the people who know each other so well, they just
say "Joke Number 17" and everybody laughs.

Rules
as representing the difference between Christianity and Judaism, or as evidence
that Christianity is a better religion, may be one that is neither official nor theologically justified,
but nevertheless seems to be understood that way in the hearts and
minds of many Christians.

One example comes from the 2006 book The Faith Club,
about a trio of women, one Jewish, one Muslim, and one Christian,
learning from each other. The Christian woman of the trio said that
prior to her transformative experience with her two friends, she used to
teach in Sunday school that Jesus' proclamation of to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength and one's neighbor as oneself
as the greatest commandment was a "radical departure" from the "don't
do this" rules of the Old Testament. As the result of her interfaith
experience, she came to understand her old view as wrong. Jesus was not opposed to his Judaism but was building on it.

A
sermon I heard several years ago provides another example of the way
Christians so often think of rules and Judaism. Criticizing the
behavior of Jews as portrayed in the New Testament, the pastor capped
his sermon with, "Sometimes you
have to do something beside just follow rules."

I'm
not saying that preacher didn't know better, but, if he did, he
couldn't or didn't stand up to what his congregation expected to hear.

Although
that particular sermon was preached at a
very politically liberal church, opinions about rules may not be so very
different
on the conservative side. A Christmas Day opinion piece several years
ago by the local paper's conservative columnist proclaimed that
"Christianity is news; other religions are advice."

That
view of Judaism by Christians--that it is (just) rules--is close to the
one my own Christian husband held before we began studying together.
Although his belief that Judaism was an ethical system revealed itself in more benign language, the implication was that Christianity, in contrast, was a religion. It was not something he had thought about or questioned; it was just an assumption that came with the territory.

Of
course, before we began studying, I myself was largely clueless,
neither knowing much about Judaism nor being clearly aware that many
Americans look down on it as consisting of only rules, ethics, or
advice.

The emphasis on "advice" can reflect, I think,
an attempt to get around the issue of rules by implying that Christian
rules, such as they are, do involve ethics--that is, right and
wrong--while the more distasteful sort of rules "just tell people what
to do" or say "do this, don't do that."

One need only
think of rules for young children, which concern safety, not ethics, to
see the limits of that dichotomy. (Sometimes it's quite hard to say
whether a rule is for safety or for right and wrong; think about it.)
Or, consider advising people to come to church regularly. Don't sleep
in on Sundays, or how to dress for church: advice!

Nor is it an issue of telling people what to do vs. what not to do, a rationalization preferred by some.

Yet
those sorts of rationalizations are in common parlance. Their purpose
is to make logical-sounding the polemic about Judaism being a religion
of rigid rules and regulations while Christianity is one of spiritual
freedom--part of the narrative built into Christianity at the
foundational level.

The very focus on freedom vs. rules that has functioned to outsource conflict and establish boundaries has also served to
exacerbate the tension between authority and freedom within Christianity, so that the fact that some people, some of the time and in significant numbers, are thinking that freedom is the opposite of rules, is sufficient to sow dissension and disunity.

All of the above feeds into our heightened American fixation on individualism, free choice, free will, and freedom from rules.

As
I have mentioned, that ethos affects not only certain segments of the
population (that is, not only Christians, and not only Protestants) but
all of us. The culture in which we live permeates all of us.

Having
made the foregoing foray into the territory of religion, we're going to
step away from religion in the next section and turn to science. The
next section focuses on the new cognitive psychological science and what
it has to do with free will and rules.

(The reader may click here to view Parts I - IV in one continuous post, or here to go to Part III.)